It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO of the biggest multi-billion-dollar corporation or the lowliest stock boy at a ghetto Big Lots: Chances are that sometime in your working life, someone is going to steal your lunch out of the communal refrigerator.
Doesn’t that just piss you off? You bring some leftover Kung Pao chicken from last night’s takeout and you’ve been thinking about it all morning — it’s the only thing that’s keeping you going, really — and you go to the fridge and it’s gone! And, as if to rub salt into that wound, they left the empty container to taunt you. And you ask me how I could just kill a man.
Thanks to our Christian society, murder just isn’t an option. So, having no other recourse, you leave a threatening note taped to the icebox door, reading, “Thanks, guys, for stealing my lunch! I hope you’re happy that I starved today! Steal my lunch again and DIE!!!”
And what about your roommates? Sure, when you guys first get together, you honestly believe that you all are going to be all BFF. You cook together, watch TV together and stay up late, talking about your hopes and dreams. But then one of you has to go off and get a significant other, and all that time together fades away, causing the lonely roommate to become a bitter shrew who finds malice in every move you make. Pretty soon, you’re getting Post-Its taped to your door, the majority of them reading, “I don’t know if you know this because you’re never home anyway, but you haven’t done the dishes in two weeks. It’s your turn — please do them or DIE!!!”
Besides jazz, the only other really original American art form has got to be the passive-aggressive note. It’s become such an everyday occurrence to see one, that we, as a society, have gotten use to them. The humor is gone. Instead, we just bitch about it to our work-mates or maybe write an even more passive-aggressive note underneath it when no one is looking. We have been beaten down by these notes. We have been emptily threatened with death too many times to take it seriously.
Consider Kerry Miler’s PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE NOTES: PAINFULLY POLITE AND HILARIOUSLY HOSTILE WRITINGS a real “stop and smell the roses” read. Based on her successful blog, Miller, like an alternate-universe POSTSECRET, collects the passive-aggressive notes that have been sent to her and, reading them in a setting like this, totally refreshes the comedy of these types of notes, recapturing their beauty. You’ll see the breakroom in a whole different way. Instead of ignoring those notes on the fridge, you’re going to want to read them like a great novel, lingering on every (misspelled) word, enjoying every life-endangering threat and comparing who’s written the best one. You might even steal someone’s yogurt just to get one. —Louis Fowler
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I had no idea that passive aggressive notes even existed.
Thanks, Bookgasm. You just made my world a little more depressing.
P.S. If you do this again to me, I kill you, man.
Except that very few of the notes are actually passive-aggressive. Does no one on the internet actually know what passive-aggressive actually means?
“Passive-aggressive” must be the new “irony,” King Rat! The editor in me is more annoyed that the title phrase isn’t hyphenated.
Well, regardless of the proper use of the word, the book is fucking hilarious.